Ministry of Innovation —

IBM develops multimedia tool for the blind

Multimedia elements on the web are largely inaccessible to those with visual …

Some may think that today's world of embedded music, video, and Flash animations would be a great enhancement to the Internet experience for the blind because they provide audio feedback. But the truth is just the opposite: visually impaired Internet users have found themselves frustrated with embedded multimedia conflicting with screen readers and self-reading browsers. This is only exacerbated by the fact that most multimedia plugins are not very accessible (if at all), and so blind users cannot navigate to their controls to stop or skip over various elements. That is why IBM has developed a tool that will allow visually impaired users to interact with multimedia on the web.

The tool, which will be usable in Internet Explorer and Firefox, will give users access to the traditional control buttons via predefined keyboard hotkeys or shortcuts, instead of forcing them to roam around the contents of the page in hopes of finding the controls. Users will also be able to access the volume controls that come with many embedded video and audio files, as well as control video and audio replay speeds. It will also allow screen readers to synchronize with the audio from an embedded source and make use of the multimedia's metadata, which will allow the two to interact to benefit the user on a much more cohesive level than before.

"The new multimedia browsing accessibility tool will enable persons with visual impairments the opportunity to access dynamic multimedia web content, quickly and easily," IBM Human Ability and Accessibility Center director Frances West said in a statement. It can come as a huge surprise that multimedia content on the web has been so inaccessible for so long to many of us who have not had to deal with the frustrations of being visually impaired. Only recently with the release of Flash 8 did Macromedia/Adobe make it easy for Flash developers to make their animations and movies more accessible to those with disabilities, although there have still been problems with videos and audio—such as those from YouTube and MySpace—automatically starting and overlapping other audio assistance being provided on a web page. When I used to develop web sites for clients more regularly, it was not terribly uncommon to encounter requests for extremely Flash-heavy pages with auto-playing content, only to be disappointed when told that such elements may conflict with screen readers. They often decided in favor of the auto-playing Flash.

IBM plans to make the software open source in order to "accelerate the enhancement and adoption of the tool to make multimedia contents accessible for visually impaired." The company plans to show the tool during the 2007 Technology & Persons with Disabilities Conference next week in Los Angeles.

Jacqui Cheng
Jacqui is an Editor at Large at Ars Technica, where she has spent the last eight years writing about Apple culture, gadgets, social networking, privacy, and more. Emailjacqui@arstechnica.com//Twitter@eJacqui